The others continue to jest, but I don’t pay attention. I can’t see any bugs, but they’re here. They’re in the walls and floors, crawling and waving their hideous feelers and doing whatever awful things it is that they do. I won’t let down my guard until I’m far, far away. I lift my ankle as if I have an itch—I do, a phantom roach itch—and surreptitiously give it a smack-scratch.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“Why?” Grace asks innocently.
I do an about-face and stroll down the hall, scanning the walls the whole time. I want to tear ass out of here, but I’ll never live that down. This was the first and last time I’ll ever step foot in Roach House. “Are you all going to torture me about this forever?”
All three say, “Yes.”
Once we’ve cleared fifteen houses total, killed eleven zombies, and found more water than our lowest estimate, it’s time for a break. We wash up, still sparingly, and eat a lunch of beans. Just beans. Which makes me hate the apocalypse more. They’re not terrible, but by the end I feel as if I’ve eaten a bowl of paste. I put down my empty bowl with a small involuntary groan.
“You don’t like beans?” Maria asks.
“Beans are great,” I say. “When wrapped in a tortilla with cheese and salsa and lots of sour cream.”
“We can make tortillas with the flour,” Grace says. She turns to Jorge and Maria. “Sylvie can’t cook.”
“I can so cook,” I say. “Macaroni and cheese, eggs, pancakes, peanut butter and jelly…I cooked all the time when I was a kid.”
“That’s why all you can make is kid food,” Grace says. “You heat up a mean chicken nugget, too.” I pretend to stab her with my spoon.
“Your mom didn’t cook?” Jorge asks.
“Nope. Unless you count cooking up a shot of heroin.”
I laugh, though no one else does. Jorge nods slowly and I look down at my bowl. I haven’t forgotten about her, exactly, but there have been too many other things to think about. Now I see her again, wasted and wrinkled in her hospital bed. And, in a similar milieu, only alive: Nodding out on the couch with her works—a needle, some cotton, a spoon and lighter—displayed on the coffee table like a bowl of M&Ms put out for guests, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. I would walk past her as I left for school and hope she’d be dead when I got home.
My old friend Resentment floods in, along with a heavy abdominal sensation that’s more than the beans. After all the years spent wishing she’d end the misery, I shouldn’t care that she’s dead. She would’ve died from the virus anyway, just as millions, billions, of others have. And I would bet ninety-five percent of those people deserved to live more than she.
I return to the conversation that’s gone on without me. It has something to do with coffee, and I don’t like the sound of it. “What?”
“No coffee tomorrow,” Maria says. “We should save the propane for food.” She doesn’t look happy about it.
“Why live in a world without coffee?” I ask.
“There must be something else to live for.” Maria takes a bite of beans and chews thoughtfully before she makes a face. “Maybe not.”
“Seriously, though, it’s your decision. This is all yours.”
I mean it more as a joke, or think I do, but Maria sets down her bowl. “How many times do I have to say it’s ours?”
“It’s not ours. You’re sharing, which I really do appreciate, but that doesn’t make it ours.”
“Jesu—” Maria takes a deep breath. “And I thought I liked coffee.”
I saw the moment when she decided not to argue, where it seemed she pitied me, and it’s worse than fighting. I point across the yards. “So, that house next?”
Without waiting for a response, I walk to the back of the yard and scale the fence more nimbly than I could only this morning. As long as I can grip the top, I’m able to use my feet and arms to get up and over. The trick is to do it fast and use your momentum. I clamber over a few more to the next house. The closed blinds block my view of whatever rattles around in the kitchen at my knock.
I lift my screwdriver and try the door. Locked, but it’s decades old and flimsy with dry rot. One kick with my too-large sneakers cracks the bottom out of the frame. Another kick and there’s a wide enough triangle to fit through. Not for me to fit through—it may have been foolish to leave the others, but I’m not stupid. I click my tongue on the roof of my mouth and watch the opening.
A hand appears first, the long nails painted sunset orange and surrounded by desiccated gray skin. Gold bangle bracelets are embedded in a small bite mark that widened into a black-edged sore on her forearm. Her head is next. I yank the snarled dark hair to expose her neck, then slam my screwdriver into the Base of Operations at the bottom of her skull. She drops on the concrete with her hand extended.
I kick in the door the rest of the way and push until the body slides with it. She’s around my age. Pretty. Still dressed in capris. Maybe she was bitten and came home to recuperate. I change my assessment when I find a man with a smashed head and a wedding band lying on the floor of the living room. I walk back to check her left hand. Her band is there, along with a diamond engagement ring.
He’s a mess. She probably nursed him until he took a chomp, and then she battered his head into a mass of goop. That’s what the side table of useless over-the-counter medicine and the bloody cast iron pan next to him suggest, in any event. She didn’t leave him when she knew. She had to know—I knew they became aggressive and had to be brought somewhere else, even if I didn’t have anywhere close to the whole story. A day into it, it was obvious there was no hope, and yet she stayed. Maybe she let him live, thinking it wouldn’t happen to him, to them. You have to love someone a lot to hold out that kind of deranged hope. Love isn’t only blind, it’s stupid.
I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror outside the bathroom door, and I don’t like the person I see. Her greasy chin-length hair is tucked behind her ears. Her brown eyes flash. Her mouth is a line. She stands with her feet spread and shoulders hard. She is a captious human being. Today’s word is captious: an ill-humored tendency to stress faults and raise objections. The word-a-day calendar is totally fucking with me.
I’m heading up the enclosed staircase when I hear voices. “Sylvie?” Grace calls.
“Yeah?”
“Just checking.”
She and Maria follow me to the empty upstairs, silent about my abrupt exit from the yard. I’m still angry, but I no longer want to kill something. Maybe because I did kill something. Grace should add zombie-killing to her psychoanalytical bag of tricks. The only problem is that now that the murderous urge has passed, my chest aches from holding back the emotions that threaten to take its place—grief, despondency, frustration with the new world and, maybe most of all, frustration with my captious self.
The next houses are more of the same: water heaters, a few zombies we chuck into the street, and a little food. Grace sighs when all I do is nod at the ten boxes of Girl Scout cookies we find in an upstairs hall closet. At the end of the day we’ve found water for over six months, another week of food, sneakers closer to my size, more clothes than we know what to do with and buckets for collecting rainwater. There are a lot of basements with a lot of tools. I was looking forward to sifting through them for something superior to a screwdriver, but somewhere along the way I’ve lost my motivation. If the point of survival is to coexist with other humans, then I should pack it in and feed myself to the hungry dead folks outside.
“I’ll make dinner,” I offer. They look at me in surprise. “What are we having again?”
“That pasta on the counter,” Maria says. “Can you do that?”
Maybe she doesn’t mean it as an insult—I’m sure she must not—but it serves to remind me of all my deficiencies. “Yes, I can boil pasta. I’m not a total idiot.”
I walk away cringing at my tone, but it’s the only way I won’t cry.
Chapter 35
Awake
since three, I’ve recited every poem I know by heart, which took five minutes, and then resorted to song lyrics. I miss music. From the time I got my first Discman to the glorious smartphone era, I’ve always had music to drown out the world. Pop in earbuds, open a book and it’s as if the world ceases to exist. I could use that now.
And, if I wore earbuds, I wouldn’t have heard the gunshots. They were far off, but something was going on out there and it didn’t sound inviting. I would have woken the others had the noises been closer, but they were barely audible before they stopped. Besides, no one would’ve wanted to keep me company after yesterday. Emotions get the best of me every time. I burn my bridges and alienate everyone, so caught up in the moment I forget that after it’s been reduced to embers and ashes, I’ll be remorseful.
There are two ways this can go: I can make everyone miserable or I can put out the fire and we can skip across the bridge. Maybe skip is the wrong word, but we can trudge. I could also not start a fire in the first place—an idea that isn’t mind-blowing but seems unattainable. Not for the first time, I could use a manual on human interaction.
I wander into the kitchen at first light. Last night, I surreptitiously dumped the pasta water from dinner into the French press to brew coffee. It isn’t going to be the best coffee ever due to the fact it’s been sitting for half a day, but it should be better than nothing. It’s an apology for being a jerk yesterday, which stretched into the evening, when I watched Maria and Jorge play dominoes with a set he found and then went to bed without saying goodnight. I pretended to be asleep when Grace came in to avoid a heart-to-heart or lecture.
The others stir a few hours later. I set down my latest survival book and wait, hands clammy, until Maria enters the kitchen. “Good morning! Two things,” I say, jumping to grab the coffee container off the counter. She eyes me warily. “Yes, yes, I know you’re not a morning person, but look!”
I pour her share of coffee into a glass and add the milk I’ve reconstituted. She looks it over while I pour my own. “I don’t know how good it is. I made it with pasta water last night.”
I stir in sugar and take a sip. Cold, but deliciously crunchy with granules of sugar, and it doesn’t taste like rigatoni. I watch her swallow some as if my fate depends on her response.
Maria smiles. “It’s good. Thanks.”
“I’m glad it’s okay.”
I want to apologize for being so taciturn, but the words don’t come. Coffee will have to do. Maria squeezes my shoulder, and I get the sense she knows. Maybe her daughter is the same way.
“The other thing is that I was reading about solar ovens,” I say. “We can make coffee in one, if we can get it hot enough. We can cook all kinds of stuff and save the propane for winter, although we might be able to use the oven in the cold as long as it’s sunny. I can make one from cardboard boxes and tin foil and a picture frame.”
Maria sits, nursing her cup. “Sounds good. Don’t you sleep?”
“Not really.”
“What do you do?”
“I sit in the dark until it’s light enough to read.”
“We have lanterns.”
“I don’t want to waste batteries or candles, and the winding is too loud.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs or to the basement and wind it?”
I’m afraid to leave this floor alone at night, but a minute of fear for fifteen minutes of light would be worth it. “Okay. I will tonight.”
The others enter and enjoy their coffee. Jorge winks as if I’m not a jerk, which makes me feel better. Grace knows I’m a jerk, of course, and she’s already forgiven me, but she still bumps me with her hip. I tell them about the noises from last night.
“Fifth Avenue was pretty empty yesterday,” Jorge says. “I think we should get the gun from Maria’s if it still is. I’ll go alone if you want to finish up the houses here.”
“I need to show you where I live,” Maria says.
“Give me the address, Maria. I think I’ll be able to figure it out from there.”
“We’ll have to break in. I don’t have keys on me. Cassie has a set, but I haven’t seen them anywhere.”
“Do the first floor windows have gates?” Jorge asks. Maria thinks for a moment and then shakes her head. “All right, that’ll make it easier.”
“I’ll come,” I say. “Jorge might need protection.”
Jorge chuckles. He doesn’t need me to protect him, but I want to show them I’m not the angry, irritable person they saw yesterday. Not always, anyway.
“I’m not letting you two go to my house by yourselves,” Maria says. “You might steal all my valuables.”
“Then I’m coming,” Grace says.
“We can’t all go,” Jorge says. “Someone has to stay here for the plan to work.”
“You can die next time,” I say to Grace. She rolls her eyes.
***
Jorge circles his head to crack his vertebrae. I wear Cassie’s light jacket made of brown canvas-type material that I hope will keep teeth out of my skin. I hold my screwdriver, though I have a spare and a bottle of water in my messenger bag, which is otherwise empty to carry things back. Maria has her ice pick and wears a backpack. She insists on checking me again for anything hanging while we wait for Grace to initiate the plan. We don’t want to give zombies something to grab.
A clanging comes from outside, where Grace beats a pot against the edge of a roof down the block to distract the zombies. It’s a great idea for this end of the trip, although how we’ll get into Maria’s building is not as thoroughly outlined.
They stagger past the door window for the noise. It stops and is followed by three loud bangs—the signal the corner is clear—and we step into the front yard. We’re hidden by stoops, but once on the sidewalk and moving, we’re committed. The zombies gawk up at Grace on the roof’s edge—dozens of bodies with mouths hanging and arms reaching, too dumb to know their arms aren’t thirty feet long.
We run across Fifth Avenue and slow to save energy on the next unoccupied block. The cool spring air feels wonderful once it makes its way through my jacket; in my clothes, it’s the prickling humidity of August. Inside one limestone house, a woman with long red hair presses her mouth to a window. Her hands leave a wet, squeaking trail on the glass, but her arms are too feeble to break it.
It’s unnerving to be out in the open. But we can always head up a stoop and through a window, then out the back or to the roofs. The city is full of hiding places, although that could work to our detriment as well. We have no clue what’s going on or who’s around us, and our only lifeline, the radio, has once again reverted to static. Today’s word is quidnunc: a person eager to know the latest gossip. I’ve never been one, but I am now. I’m as quidnunc-y as they come.
On Sixth Avenue, we crouch and scurry behind parked cars to avoid a group across the sun-dappled street. I’m last in line and so wholly concentrated on keeping my feet quiet that I spot the approaching feet between bumpers a moment too late. I look up into the face of a guy, once my age, whose skin has sunken along his cheekbones and rippled into the hollows of his cheeks like a mummy. His head vibrates with his hiss and his hands reach in slow motion, black crescents under every fingernail.
I scramble back and fall on my ass. My screwdriver flies from my hand and clacks against a car, then rolls into the street. I’m on my feet before he is, but between the noise and my being upright, I’ve managed to summon everyone to join Operation Gun Retrieval.
We run. The zombies on our block follow. The ones ahead start our way. We’re the meat in a zombie sandwich. It was bound to happen at some point, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be my mistake that set it into motion. The next block is a series of dodges and feints, but we make it through. Maria points out her apartment building around the corner, but we have a problem—twenty problems, in fact, heading up her block, and no time to force open a door or window.
The fire escape ladder is partially lowered, and Maria leaps into the air and travels
up the rungs. Jorge waits for me to close the final feet. The metal is rough and covered with years of flaking paint, but nothing has ever been as welcome as the possible tetanus I might contract. There isn’t time to be scared of heights, even when the ladder swings from Jorge’s weight beneath. I reach the second floor balcony, glance at the group gathered below and sway on wobbly legs—now there’s time to be scared of heights.
Maria peers through the window, then raises it and calls into the apartment. No answer. We follow her into a living room with a couch and striped chairs and a painting on one wall that reminds me—in color and style if not subject—of the one covered with a cloth in Cassie’s studio. Maria places her ice pick on the coffee table and sits on the couch, hands clasped between her knees. This is her apartment. The entertainment center is glass, with framed photos and crafts made by children a decade or two ago. It’s nothing fancy—I don’t think Maria was rolling in money—but it’s homey and comfortable.
Maria stands. “Sit. Let me see if we have something to drink besides water.”
“I don’t want to ruin your furnit—” Jorge begins, but Maria’s laughter stops him mid-sentence. He smiles sheepishly and sits on the couch, pulling out his hair tie and smoothing the stray curls into place before he refastens it.
“We have warm soda, warm beer and warm juice,” Maria calls from the kitchen.
I’d love a beer, but I can’t afford to lose any smarts. I go with soda. It’s extra fizzy, being warm, and the bubbles cut through the grime in my mouth. I miss sweet. I miss candy. The stores we passed are most likely stripped bare, not that there was time to shop.
“Sorry for almost killing us all,” I say.
Maria shakes her head. Jorge swallows a gulp of soda and says, “Aw, mami, it could have been any of us. Shit’s gonna happen—we have to be able to handle it, you know?”
I nod, thankful they’re so understanding. “No beer?” I ask.
“I don’t drink anymore,” he says.
I think about asking him if he’s in the rooms, but there’s a reason they call it Alcoholics Anonymous. “Thanks for letting me go first up the fire escape. You didn’t have to wait.”
The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious Page 19